Reform list begins with ABC on top

THE Abbott government's window of opportunity for major reform is rapidly closing.

THE Abbott government's window of opportunity for major reform is rapidly closing. Whether the conservatives were popularly elected or the former Labor government was resoundingly rejected last year is nothing but a tired debating point. Tony Abbott is the PM and must now demonstrate he can be more than the most effective Opposition Leader in the nation's history. The challenges he faces are no mystery and the people who voted for change are clamouring to see that change effected. No torrents of weasel words or hand-wringing equivocation and intolerable gestures of appeasement to the defeated Green and Labor voters who kept the worst governments in memory in office for the past six years will substitute for real action. Opportunities abound for Abbott and his cabinet colleagues to show they stand for something more than politics as usual. On climate change, the NSW government has shown the way by sinking the previous Labor government's over-enthusiastic embrace of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's extraordinarily inaccurate forecasts of rising sea levels. The IPCC, informed by ideologically wedded scientists of the same ilk as those now waiting to be expensively airlifted from their enforced deep-freeze experiment aboard the Russian icebreaker Akademik Shokalskiy, predicted sea-level rise at nearly 10 times the actual rate recorded in recent decades - 40cm by 2050 - compared with just more than 4cm, based on a projection of the recent historical record. Some NSW councils, notably the Great Lakes Council on the mid-north coast, turned a blind eye to their own expanding stretches of beach to enforce absurd Green building restrictions in the region. The federal government should jettison the IPCC's flawed predictions just as they dumped the overpaid and equally erroneous Tim Flannery from his sinecure as Climate Change Commissioner. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has already made a good start at turning around the cripplingly expensive and vastly overrated NBN project with his thorough review of the disastrous program. However, there is enormous scope for the government to go much further and review the national communication framework. Ten Network chairman Lachlan Murdoch recently made an eloquent call for genuine reforms which recognise the converged digital media world but the government still gives the appearance of being hostage to regulation that hasn't changed much since the Gutenberg press starting rattling off printed sheets and crystal radio sets pulled wireless signals from the air. Communications today are increasingly via the unregulated internet and - as Murdoch noted - half the audience for his channel's ratings hit The Bachelor Australia watched online via digital streaming service TENplay, but it was not subject to the same regulations as the other half viewing the linear broadcast. "The existing media regulatory framework does not reflect the rise of digital media and the convergence of media - and nor is it a level playing field," he said. "The media industry needs a framework that is focused on the future. "Media regulations must focus on how to best serve Australia for the next 100 years, not the past 100 years." Any review of media must capture the fate of public broadcasting, particularly the disgracefully performing national broadcaster the ABC and its less-remarked upon sibling SBS. Former Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy should be paraded through the major cities as punishment for his appalling stewardship of the communications portfolio. Not the least of his abysmal performances was the awarding of the $223 million Australia Network contract to the ABC after serial recommendations that the contract go to rival bidder Sky News. Sky News Australia is part owned by UK-based pay-TV company BSkyB, which is controlled by 21st Century Fox, a sister company to News Corporation, the ultimate publisher of The Daily Telegraph. As Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told The Australian newspaper yesterday, the way the previous Labor government "corrupted the tender process ... and prevented a competitive process from occurring has resulted in ongoing concerns about the contract that was awarded to the ABC." She said she was aware of concerns within her department about whether the terms of the contract were being met, but also expressed wider worries of her own. "I also have concerns about the quality of the programming and whether it is meeting the goal of promoting Australia's interests overseas," Ms Bishop said. "It is meant to be a tool of public diplomacy and I am concerned by the level of negative feedback I receive from overseas." Just last month, the ABC chairman Jim Spigelman admitted that the Australia Network contract process had been "flawed". This is an understatement. If more proof was needed that the $1.2 billion-a-year ABC cannot manage itself, look no further than its pathetic and widely criticised coverage of Sydney's New Year's Eve fireworks display. LABOR'S LEGACY A CIRCUS OF CLOWNS WATCHING the former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke duel with his former partner, treasurer and political assassin Paul Keating over who did what and to whom in 1986 and 1987 is like watching a couple of toothless old tomcats scrapping on a garbage heap. As Hawke told ABC radio before the release of the old Cabinet documents, and after Keating had been given almost unlimited time by our ABC to rework the historical record: "To have to carry on and do some of this rewriting and exaggeration - it's sad, I don't know why he thinks he had to do it. "It's clear from any reading of the public record who was driving the government from the end of 1984. Ask the Australian people. They kept voting for me." Their spat serves to remind the broader population of the unlimited arrogance both men exhibited when in office - and how the luvvies salivated as their anointed preened on the public stage. Keating was so blinded by his own image that he delighted in his own vaudevillesque depiction in the eponymous musical written by Casey Bennetto after his disappointment at the Howard Coalition's fourth election victory in 2004. But, while the Keating character pranced about ridiculously, John Howard was portrayed as a plodder who sang in a number titled The Mateship: "Hang on a tic, just let me talk 'Cos you can tell by the way I use my walk I'm just a bloke, a normal bloke, and nothin' more I've got my home, I've got my health I've got my lovely wife and kids, I've got not tickets on myself I'm just a bloke, an Aussie bloke, to the core." It was the Aussie bloke to the core who Australians took to their hearts and for whom they still retain the greatest respect, not the Labor luvvies' circus clowns.